* The British spell their name with a u—Gurkahs—though around Darjeeling it always has an o. They generally prefer to be called Indian Gorkha.
* The two are similar umbrella organizations. The DTA is older, larger—it represents about three-fourths of Darjeeling’s gardens—and more active in labor issues.
CHAPTER 13
Midnight’s Planters
India gained independence on August 15, 1947. A new era for the country ensued—and for Darjeeling tea. Many European owners sold their estates to wealthy Indians, perhaps believing they would never enjoy the same authority they had before.1 In some cases, suppliers became owners. Local contractors, for instance, supplied wood for chests used to pack tea and, over the years, accrued credit. They tallied the IOUs and then paid the difference between what they were owed and the value of the estate.2
The changeover often meant that the new owners had fewer ties to the land. “Darjeeling’s old managers had been rooted in the soil; they were linked to the pioneer planters and closely connected to each other through business or by marriage. Plantation labour accepted them as heaven-sent patriarchs. Tea was more than an industry, it was a way of life. The new proprietors were often wealthy businessmen who cut costs, demanded quick profits and operated long-distance.”3 They were looking closer at bottom lines than traditions.
During the nineteenth century, estates had been planted out in a forty-forty-twenty scheme: 40 percent for the tea crop, 40 percent left wild as a natural buffer and soil anchor, and the remainder for housing and workers’ facilities. But many of the new crop of owners had terraces removed, shade trees cut to plant more tea shrubs, and allowed encroachment on the natural portions, all of which destabilized the land and caused topsoil losses. Following the industrial development so strongly advocated by the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, the new owners embraced the latest generation of chemical applications. Fascinated by science and believing that it “must be made the handmaiden of economic progress,” Nehru was keen to make India a modern, industrialized nation as quickly as possible,4 with farming a priority. “Everything else can wait,” he said not long after independence, “but not agriculture.”
“Until 1955–56 there were no chemicals in tea. It was organic,” said Marybong’s Vijay Dhancholia. That was when India began striving for food independence, Dhancholia explained, instead of buying “third-rate stuff from Australia and the USA” to feed the country’s surging population. Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan (Hail the Soldier, Hail the Farmer) was a catchphrase coined in 1965 by the country’s second prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, to cheer on India’s soldiers battling Pakistan along the Kashmir border, as well as farmers in their agricultural revolution. Fueling that modernizing sprint and spirit were chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. The 1966–67 harvesting year marked the onset of the green revolution in India, a term that didn’t refer to the contemporary sense of natural or organic farming but rather making the best use of higher-yielding varieties and chemical inputs to increase production. This began a cycle of using progressively larger amounts of such inputs just to keep yields from falling.
As elsewhere in India, yields initially climbed on Darjeeling tea estates. Darjeeling estates produced 7.8 million kilograms (17.2 million pounds) of tea in 1951 and topped 10 million kilograms (22 million pounds) by 1960. To sustain levels above 10 million kilograms a year, more chemicals were thrown at the plants. These killed off useful microorganisms and also sapped the land of natural nourishment. The ground between the tea plants was kept clean so that the chemicals would be absorbed by the bushes, not weeds, which further contributed to soil erosion.
Farming had moved, within a few decades, from one extreme to another.
Although ousted as colonial rulers, the British still controlled the tea sector until 1974.5 On the first day of that year the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA) of 1973 was instituted.* It tightened currency controls on foreign companies in India and instigated the Indianization, or rupeeization, of companies in the country by limiting foreign-owned stakes, making it harder to take profits out of India, and restricting expansion and diversification.6 Some companies complied with the new laws, but others simply left as a result. (Mostly famously, Coca-Cola pulled out rather than partner with an Indian company and turn over its secret recipe as the government demanded; they didn’t return until 1993.)
While sectors, including those engaged in trading, could retain a maximum 40 percent foreign-equity holding, tea companies were given a special dispensation that allowed 74 percent ownership.7 Even that was unpalatable. British firms in the tea industry that had stayed after independence had steadily been losing interest and had already begun exploring alternatives to growing tea in India. The new regulations provoked further divesting and accelerated development of estates in Kenya.8 The East African country was blessed with altitude and rainfall—and room to expand. “The British had a major advantage in Africa,” wrote E. Jaiwant Paul, onetime director of tea giant Brooke Bond India, “because they could take full benefit of their decades of experience in other countries and incorporate the more recent technical advances both in cultivation and in manufacture on the African estates.”9 Or, as Sandeep Mukherjee put it, “Any handicaps they had here they did away with in Kenya.”
The shift was swift. The year of independence India exported 127.2 million kilograms (280 million pounds) of tea to the UK, half of its total production and the lion’s share of its total exports. A decade later it hit 135.4 million kilograms, but then began to slide.10 By 1977 UK imports had dropped to 74.3 million kilograms, and in 1987 they were a paltry 22.4 million kilograms, down nearly 85 percent from their 1947 level.11 Currently Indian tea exports to the UK sit around 16 million kilograms. The UK now gets about 60 percent of its tea from Africa.12 Today Kenya is the continent’s tea giant and the world’s fourth-largest producer. Grown largely in the highlands and nearly all CTC, the tea is bold and vigorous, fresh, and brews a reddish-coppery liquor. It is used in blending, often in breakfast teas.
When India lost the UK market, the USSR and Eastern Europe stepped in to replace it. In 1947, the Soviet Union imported just 4 million kilograms (8.8 million pounds) of tea from India; by 1991, imports had risen to 104.5 million kilograms (230 million pounds), 51.5 percent of India’s total tea exports.13
Soviet buyers preferred dark brews rather than the fine and floral qualities of tea from the Darjeeling hills. “They wanted the cheapest,” recalled the third-generation tea merchant Vijay Sarda in his Darjeeling shop Nathmulls. He sat on a stool at the door greeting acquaintances passing along the narrow sidewalk, while his son, Girish, stood behind the counter. “They’d say, ‘We want tea in this price category and good for human consumption.’ Those were the guidelines.” He laughed and shook his head at the memory. “‘And good for human consumption’!”
The breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 threw the Indian tea industry into crisis. The trade agreements between the two countries that the industry had to come to rely on suddenly vanished. “We put all our eggs in one basket and pushed away the competition,” the joint-secretary of the Indian Tea Association said in a 1994 BusinessWeek piece on Darjeeling’s post-Soviet troubles.14 With less money to spend, Russians began buying cheaper teas from places such as Sri Lanka instead of India, much less the pricey Darjeeling varieties.